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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
In his historical biography, "Sir Walter Raleigh and His Time," Charles Kingsley presents a vivid portrait of the Elizabethan era through the life of the renowned explorer and writer, Sir Walter Raleigh. Kingsley employs a rich narrative style that blends meticulous research with imaginative storytelling, capturing the fervor of the Renaissance and the complexities of Raleigh's character. The book seamlessly intertwines historical events with personal anecdotes, illuminating Raleigh's contributions to exploration, literature, and the intricacies of court life, all while reflecting on the social and political currents of the period. Charles Kingsley was not only a prominent Victorian novelist but also a historian, social reformer, and theologian. His deep interest in social justice and the natural world likely influenced his portrayal of Raleigh as a multifaceted individual, struggling with the contradictions of ambition and morality. Kingsley's own experiences in academia and his engagement with the pressing issues of his time imbue his work with a passionate yet critical perspective on historical narratives. This book is highly recommended for readers interested in the intersections of literature, exploration, and history, as Kingsley invites us to understand Raleigh not just as a figure of the past but as a reflection of the enduring human quest for knowledge and the complexities of ambition. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Sir Walter Raleigh and His Time
Table of Contents
Introduction
This is a portrait of restless ambition set against an age that believed discovery, faith, and power could remake the world. Charles Kingsley presents Sir Walter Raleigh not merely as a singular figure but as a lens through which the turbulence and aspirations of Elizabethan England come into focus. The narrative invites readers into courtly chambers, along coasts and rivers, and through the intellectual ferment that fused poetry, navigation, and statecraft. Rather than isolating a hero’s deeds, Kingsley places character amid circumstance, showing how personal vision and public duty collide. The result is a study of personality entwined with a nation’s dawning global imagination.
Sir Walter Raleigh and His Time is a work of historical biography shaped by the Victorian fascination with the Elizabethan era. Written by Charles Kingsley, an English clergyman and novelist, it appeared in the mid-nineteenth century, when national history and moral inquiry often shared the same page. The book’s setting reaches across late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England and its expanding Atlantic horizons, from royal courts to frontier ventures. Kingsley’s perspective reflects his period’s narrative history, addressing the past with confident prose and a desire to extract lessons from character. Readers encounter a biographical portrait that is also a cultural panorama of a formative epoch.
The premise is straightforward: follow Raleigh’s life while illuminating the political, religious, and intellectual climate that he navigated. Kingsley writes with an orator’s momentum, alternating between scene-setting and reflective commentary to give readers both motion and perspective. The experience is immersive rather than archival, seeking coherence and meaning over exhaustive documentation. Readers who enjoy vigorous prose and a clear narrative line will find a guide eager to connect events with motives and public consequences. The mood is energetic, occasionally admonitory, and fundamentally engaged with questions of duty, reputation, and the costs of ambition in a world newly aware of its widening stage.
Several themes recur with emphasis. Ambition and service shape the portrait, as Raleigh’s talents move between court favor and outward enterprise. Religious conflict and national rivalry provide a constant backdrop, framing decisions in terms of conscience and allegiance. Exploration appears as both practical endeavor and imaginative horizon, linking maritime skill to poetry, rumor, and hope. Kingsley also foregrounds the interplay of art and power, considering how words, images, and performances define identity in an era of surveillance and spectacle. Through these threads, the book asks what kind of character can endure public scrutiny, and what a nation expects from the figures it elevates to embody its ideals.
Kingsley’s method seeks the unity of a life with its age, favoring narrative clarity and moral through-lines over specialized argument. He writes as a Victorian mediator of the past, distilling complex episodes into readable sequences and highlighting traits he deems exemplary or cautionary. The emphasis falls on character, decision, and consequence, with history presented as a series of tests that reveal temperament under pressure. Readers should expect a confident, synthesizing voice rather than a modern critical apparatus. This approach, characteristic of its time, makes the book accessible while also reflecting nineteenth-century assumptions about progress, providence, and the instructive value of great lives.
For contemporary readers, the book’s lasting interest lies in the questions it raises about exploration, memory, and national story-making. It shows how reputation is built at the crossroads of achievement, narrative, and political need, inviting scrutiny of how public figures are assembled by their admirers and opponents. It draws attention to the exhilaration and unease of expansion, where curiosity, commerce, and conscience do not always align. It asks how literature and policy speak to each other, and how ideals survive contact with contingency. By framing a life within its public theatre, Kingsley prompts reflection on leadership, loyalty, risk, and the narratives by which communities understand themselves.
Approached as both biography and cultural study, Sir Walter Raleigh and His Time offers a lucid, vigorous entry into Elizabethan history through the figure of a statesman-poet. Readers interested in the intersection of personal ambition and national destiny will find a compelling guide to the era’s energy and contradictions. The book rewards those who enjoy eloquent storytelling and broad thematic connections, while leaving room to consult more specialized scholarship afterward. Its pages invite careful, reflective reading: to note the rhetoric that shapes remembrance, to weigh conduct against circumstance, and to consider how an age announces itself through its protagonists. It is a lively gateway to a defining moment in English history.
Synopsis
Charles Kingsley’s Sir Walter Raleigh and His Time presents a historical portrait of Raleigh within the wider transformation of late Tudor and early Stuart England. The book interweaves biography with social, religious, and political context, emphasizing the contest with Spain, the pressures of the Reformation, and the opening of the Atlantic world. Drawing on chronicles, letters, and travel narratives, Kingsley follows Raleigh’s career to illustrate how court, camp, and sea shaped English fortunes. The narrative introduces Raleigh as an archetypal Elizabethan—soldier, courtier, navigator, and writer—whose actions and ambitions mirrored his nation’s emerging maritime identity and helped set the course for later expansion.
The account begins with Raleigh’s West Country origins, kinship ties to seafaring families, and early exposure to the perils and opportunities of the ocean. It notes his brief schooling and legal training, followed by service as a volunteer in the French wars and then in Ireland, where he gained notice for decisiveness and leadership. Returning to court, Raleigh attracted Queen Elizabeth’s favor through military reputation, administrative skill, and polished address. Offices, grants, and responsibilities followed, placing him among the queen’s trusted servants. Kingsley uses this ascent to detail how merit, regional networks, and proximity to the monarch could convert individual ability into national enterprise.
With Raleigh established at court, Kingsley sets the geopolitical stage: Spanish imperial power, religious rivalry, and the strategic value of the seas. The narrative outlines England’s turn to oceanic ventures as policy and necessity, with Raleigh advising on naval preparedness and supporting licensed privateering against Spain. The threat of the Armada in 1588 anchors the section, highlighting preparations along the Channel and the new confidence gained from the campaign’s outcome. Kingsley emphasizes that tactics, ship design, and seamanship matured in these years, and that Raleigh combined martial prudence with advocacy for forward, ocean-facing strategies that would shape English conduct through the long war.
Turning to colonization, the book recounts Raleigh’s patent to plant settlements in the New World and the reconnaissance voyages that named Virginia. It describes the Roanoke expeditions, the challenges of supply and leadership, and interactions with Indigenous peoples, while recording the contributions of observers who mapped, collected, and reported on the region’s resources. The narrative acknowledges the ultimate failure of these early colonies and the disappearance that later fascinated readers, yet stresses their lasting value: knowledge gathered, maritime routes tested, and an enduring idea of English settlement across the Atlantic that would be taken up by others in the next generation.
Kingsley then traces the volatility of court favor. Raleigh’s secret marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton led to brief imprisonment and loss of influence, though he soon returned to public service. The narrative proceeds to his 1595 expedition to Guiana, describing the ascent of great rivers, alliances sought, and the report later published as The Discovery of Guiana. Raleigh’s vision of a rich interior and a strategic outflanking of Spain framed the venture’s purpose. The book records mixed reactions at home—curiosity, skepticism, and policy debate—while showing how Raleigh’s arguments linked gold, geography, and national security within a single imperial strategy.
War with Spain resumed at scale, and Kingsley details Raleigh’s prominent roles in seaborne campaigns, including the capture of Cadiz in 1596 and the Islands Voyage of 1597. These operations illustrate evolving English tactics and the reliance on experienced captains from the West Country. The book also surveys Raleigh’s Irish estates and participation in plantation schemes, using them to discuss the crown’s approach to Ireland. Alongside warfare and governance, Kingsley notes Raleigh’s patronage of learning and letters, his association with figures such as Edmund Spenser and Thomas Harriot, and his curiosity in practical science—features presented as hallmarks of the broader Elizabethan milieu.
The narrative moves to the closing years of Elizabeth’s reign and the fall of the Earl of Essex, emphasizing Raleigh’s careful navigation of factional politics. With Elizabeth’s death in 1603, James I’s accession altered priorities, notably a new inclination toward peace with Spain. Raleigh’s arrest, trial on charges of treason, and condemnation followed, though the sentence was stayed. Kingsley’s account of Raleigh’s long imprisonment in the Tower highlights disciplined study, chemical and mechanical experiments, and the composition of the History of the World, a vast, unfinished work. This period is portrayed as an intellectual consolidation that preserved his reputation even as his political influence waned.
After years of petitions and proposals, Raleigh was released to lead another Guiana venture under strict conditions not to offend Spain. The 1617–1618 expedition is narrated as a demanding enterprise of disease, supply shortfalls, and disputed intelligence, culminating in a clash near San Thomé and the failure to secure the promised riches. The death of key subordinates and the breakdown of the mission’s objectives framed its return. Kingsley places the voyage in the context of fragile diplomacy and the constraints of a changed policy environment, contrasting the freer Elizabethan war years with the cautious, treaty-bound strategies of the early Stuart regime.
The book concludes with Raleigh’s surrender to royal authority, his execution in 1618, and contemporary reactions at home and abroad. Kingsley’s closing synthesis presents Raleigh as both product and agent of a formative age—bold in conception, versatile in action, and emblematic of a nation turning seaward. The narrative underlines the emergence of English sea power, the first experiments in overseas settlement, and a culture that braided chivalry, inquiry, and commerce. It also marks the costs of courtly rivalry and diplomatic recalibration. By uniting life and milieu, the work’s central message is the making of modern England through adventure, policy, and the discipline of the ocean.
Historical Context
Charles Kingsley situates Sir Walter Raleigh within the crucible of late Tudor and early Stuart England, roughly 1558–1618, when Protestant state-building, oceanic exploration, and dynastic uncertainty intersected. The setting spans London’s courtly milieu, the maritime West Country (Devon and Cornwall), Ireland’s contested plantations, and Atlantic and South American frontiers from Roanoke to Guiana. The period’s institutions include Elizabeth I’s centralized monarchy, an expanding Royal Navy, and emergent chartered ventures. Its pressures—confessional division, Spanish rivalry, and the fiscal demands of war—shape Raleigh’s opportunities and dangers. Kingsley’s canvas thus includes embattled coastal towns, council chambers, and tropical rivers, portraying an England inventing imperial habits amid religious and political upheaval.
The English Reformation’s consolidation defined Raleigh’s world. Elizabeth I’s Religious Settlement (1559) established a Protestant Church of England, backed by recusancy laws and sharpened by Pius V’s excommunication (Regnans in Excelsis, 1570). Continental conflict reinforced a Protestant security logic: the Dutch Revolt (from 1568) drew English aid by the Treaty of Nonsuch (1585); French Wars of Religion culminated in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572); and the Spanish Inquisition symbolized Catholic militancy. Mary, Queen of Scots’ execution (1587) dramatized internal threat. Kingsley connects Raleigh to this pan-Protestant struggle, presenting him as an English agent whose ventures—military, maritime, and colonial—advance a confessional and national cause against Habsburg power.
The Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604) and the Spanish Armada (1588) reoriented English policy around sea power. Lord Howard of Effingham and Sir Francis Drake shattered the Armada at Gravelines (July–August 1588), after which storms destroyed the retreating fleet. Raleigh, a West Country organizer and strategist, had his ship Ark Raleigh taken into royal service as Ark Royal, the flagship, and directed coastal defense in the southwest. He rose further in the Cadiz expedition (21 June 1596), led by the Earl of Essex and Howard, where he helped storm the harbor and argued for burning the Spanish fleet, crippling logistics. In the 1597 Islands Voyage to the Azores, he seized Fayal. Kingsley emphasizes these operations as the forge of an aggressive, Protestant naval polity.
Ireland’s wars provided Raleigh with early command and a model of plantation. During the Second Desmond Rebellion (1579–1583), Lord Deputy Grey de Wilton crushed resistance in Munster; at Smerwick (1580), foreign mercenaries were executed after surrender. Raleigh served as captain under Grey, acquiring notoriety for severity and skill. Postwar confiscations created the Munster Plantation; Raleigh received extensive grants around Youghal and Lismore (circa 1586) and served as mayor of Youghal in 1588–1589. Estates became laboratories for English settlement practices—tenurial reshaping, market integration, and urban oversight. Kingsley links these Irish experiences to Raleigh’s later colonial thinking, showing how conquest, plantation, and Protestant governance were rehearsed domestically before being exported across the Atlantic.
Raleigh’s North American project began with Elizabeth I’s 1584 patent to discover and colonize lands named Virginia. The Amadas–Barlowe reconnaissance (July 1584) reported favorably on the Outer Banks. A military colony under Ralph Lane (1585) on Roanoke Island suffered supply failures despite Sir Richard Grenville’s efforts and was evacuated by Drake in 1586. The 1587 “Cittie of Raleigh,” led by Governor John White, brought 115 settlers; Virginia Dare was born 18 August 1587. White’s delayed return (1590) found the site deserted, marked “CROATOAN.” Likely causes included provisioning gaps, strained Algonquian relations, and Spanish threat. Kingsley treats these ventures as audacious prototypes for English America, framing Raleigh’s vision and organizational reach despite conspicuous failure.
Raleigh’s Guiana enterprise sought wealth and strategic leverage. In 1595 he sailed with five ships, captured the Spanish town of San José de Oruña on Trinidad, imprisoned Governor Antonio de Berrío, and ascended the Orinoco to the Caroní, gathering reports of Manoa (El Dorado). He published The Discoverie of Guiana (1596), a persuasive brief for settlement and alliance with indigenous polities against Spain. After James I’s accession (1603) and Raleigh’s imprisonment, a second voyage departed in 1617 on condition he avoid Spanish attacks. Under Lawrence Keymis, the expedition assaulted San Thomé on the Orinoco; Raleigh’s son Walter was killed. The breach doomed him diplomatically. Kingsley uses these journeys to explore ambition, intelligence-gathering, and the perils of imperial propaganda.
Court politics framed Raleigh’s ascent and ruin. He rose with Elizabeth I through service, patents, and proximity, yet incurred disgrace after a secret 1591 marriage to Bess Throckmorton. Rivalries with the Earl of Essex shaped campaigns and patronage. The 1603 succession of James VI and I reordered factions; Raleigh was implicated in the Main Plot with Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham, tried at Winchester (November 1603), and condemned for treason on contested testimony. Confined in the Tower (1603–1616), he wrote The History of the World (1614), ranging to the Second Macedonian War (168 BCE), and pursued chemical experiments. Released for Guiana in 1616, he returned amid diplomatic furor and was executed on 29 October 1618 at Old Palace Yard. Kingsley presents these reversals as indictments of capricious patronage.
Kingsley deploys Raleigh’s life to critique the era’s social and political order. He condemns a court system in which monopolies, factional slander, and royal caprice override merit, allowing foreign policy to be set by intrigue rather than strategy. Spanish imperial violence and confessional coercion are opposed to a Protestant ethic of enterprise; yet the narrative also exposes the moral ambiguities of conquest in Ireland and Guiana. Raleigh becomes a lens on class rigidity, where a talented provincial must barter honor for access, and on the state’s suspicion of inquiry and innovation. The book argues, historically, that national vigor rests on protecting explorers, reformers, and technicians from the paralysis of courtly cabal.
